TruthArchive.ai - Tweets Saved By @caitoz

@caitoz - Caitlin Johnstone

No mentally healthy person wants to rule the world. Nobody with a functioning conscience and a working empathy center in their brain is interested in becoming a billionaire. We are ruled by the most dysfunctional members of our species. The most wounded, neurotic and sociopathic among us. The least wise, caring and insightful. What drives a person to claw their way to the top of a wildly sick society and become a lord of the dystopia? What compels someone to amass obscene amounts of wealth in a world where so many have far too little? What causes someone to ascend to political leadership of a power structure that's built for the purpose of robbing and oppressing the most underprivileged populations on earth? Nothing wholesome, to be sure. That impulse is never coming from anywhere good. The worst among us are striving to prevail in this dystopia by riding the tides of its ugliest inclinations, while the best among us are striving to dismantle the dystopia and replace it with something kind and equitable. This causes the worst of us to be elevated to the top and the best of us to be smacked down to the bottom. Under our current system easiest way to set yourself on a trajectory from millionaire to billionaire to trillionaire is to exploit workers, crush your competition, plunder the available resources of the global south, externalize the costs of industry onto society and the ecosystem, bribe the government to advance your corporate interests via lobbying and campaign donations, contract with the most murderous military and intelligence agencies in the world, and psychologically manipulate the public into consuming products and services they don't need. Who is going to be most successful in this endeavor? The very worst people alive. People whose hearts and minds are so stunted and dysfunctional that they see other human beings as tools for their own personal enrichment, to be used up and discarded like juice boxes or condoms. These are the people who are touching the most lives on this planet. These are the people whose decisions affect the most people. Michael Parenti has passed away after a luminous life advancing powerful ideas and insights about the abusive dynamics of human civilization and how best to address them. He did not die a wealthy man. The mainstream papers did not report on his departure from our world. Only a relatively small percentage of the population is aware he ever lived. But everyone knows who Elon Musk is. Everyone knows who Jeff Bezos is. Who Bill Gates is. The best of us live and die in relative obscurity, generally being subjected to scorn and derision from the ruling establishment the entire time. The worst of us become plutocratic demigods. It's an uphill battle. You spend your life swimming against dystopia, and you are not handsomely rewarded for your efforts. You'll get deplatformed, censored and smeared. You might even get shot by government agents for standing up for the disempowered. And you'll definitely never be a billionaire. But it's absolutely worth it, and you should do it. Fighting for truth and justice in a civilization made of injustice and deceit is the only way to live. It's the only way to feel satisfied with your efforts during this life. The only way to be sure that when you are on your deathbed you can look back and know you spent your time here in a right and admirable way. It costs a lot to fight for a healthy world. But it costs a lot more not to.

@caitoz - Caitlin Johnstone

No Healthy Person Wants To Rule The World Or Become A Billionaire https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/no-healthy-person-wants-to-rule-the

No Healthy Person Wants To Rule The World Or Become A Billionaire Reading by Tim Foley: caitlinjohnst.one

@caitoz - Caitlin Johnstone

Israel And Its Supporters Deliberately Foment Hate And Division In Our Society "Their research has concluded that convincing westerners to hate Muslims is easier than convincing them to love Israel." Reading by Tim Foley. https://t.co/ne4eDzn3oD

@caitoz - Caitlin Johnstone

Apparently my opposition to genocide has landed me at the top of a list compiled by the Israeli government. https://t.co/wPA5rLddFp

@caitoz - Caitlin Johnstone

Of all the horrible things Israel and its western backers do to Palestinians, among the most evil is the way it uses them as lab rats to field test new weapons systems so the rest of the empire can learn how effective they are.

@Antiwarcom - Antiwar.com

Israel to Deploy Dozens of Autonomous Weapons Systems in West Bank by Kyle Anzalone @KyleAnzalone_ #Israel #WestBank #Palestinians https://libertarianinstitute.org/news/israel-to-deploy-dozens-of-autonomous-weapons-systems-in-west-bank/

Israel to Deploy Dozens of Autonomous Weapons Systems in West Bank | The Libertarian Institute The Israeli Defense Forces are preparing to place dozens of weapons systems across the West Bank that can be operated automatically or remotely.  According to a report from Israeli Army Radio, the Samson Remote Controlled Weapon Station will be deployed to dozens of checkpoints, settlement entrances, and key control points.… libertarianinstitute.org

@caitoz - Caitlin Johnstone

Some of the strongest evidence of Israeli sadism and savagery is footage created by Israeli soldiers themselves, many of whom are identified and named by Al Jazeera in this documentary. Israel will probably be targeting Al Jazeera even more aggressively in retaliation for this.

@caitoz - Caitlin Johnstone

They bombed the Tabeen school in Gaza City with so much explosive force that not a single full body was recovered. It was just pieces of people everywhere. They bagged body parts in 70-kilogram piles to try and estimate a death toll. It was impossible to identify bodies or sort out which parts belonged where. Just one big stretch of undifferentiated carnage. Kind of like how the entire Gaza onslaught is starting to feel. These massacres are all starting to blur together, like the lifeless bodies ripped apart and mixed together in bags. We westerners say “another massacre” when we talk about it, referring to it as just one more nightmare in an uninterrupted deluge of nightmares that’s been going on for ten months. But it wasn’t “another massacre” for the people who were there. For the woman whose foot that used to belong to. For the boy who used to own that arm. For the man whose intestines those once were. For them it was the end of the world. For their loved ones it was unfathomable anguish. Each and every one of these victims in each and every one of these massacres felt as much as you and I, cared as much as you and I, hoped and dreamed and loved and longed like you and I, and was just as capable of suffering as you and I. Their bodies intermingle in the wreckage and the massacres intermingle in our memories, but we can’t just let it all blur together into background white noise. We can’t let this become our baseline. Our new normal. We can’t let them do that to us. We can’t let them rob us of our humanity like that. Do not let them harden you. On top of everything else they’ve taken from this world, don’t let them take your caring and sensitivity as well. Every death in that school was just as significant as the earliest deaths when this nightmare first began. The only thing making us see it as “another massacre” is our reflex to avoid feeling it all for the first time from moment to moment. But this is all happening for the first time. That woman had never died before. Neither had that boy, or that man. All their hopes and dreams and plans were cut off for the very first time. All their experiences. All their relationships. Everything they had to share. Those endings deserve a bit more weight and a bit more reverence than having been part of just “another massacre”. It’s safe to feel. It might hurt, but it won’t harm. We can just pause, put our hands over our hearts, feel the feelings deeply and respectfully all the way through, and then get back into the fight to try and stop this thing. The victims deserve our sorrow. We deserve to have wide open hearts full of compassion. And the monsters who are doing this absolutely do not deserve to take it away from us.

@caitoz - Caitlin Johnstone

President Biden — if you feel like pretending Biden is still serving as president and still making the decisions in the White House — has pledged to support Israel against any retaliations against its recent assassination spree in Iran and Lebanon which killed high-profile officials from Hamas and Hezbollah. A White House statement asserts that Biden spoke with Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday and “reaffirmed his commitment to Israel’s security against all threats from Iran, including its proxy terrorist groups Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis,” and “discussed efforts to support Israel’s defense against threats, including against ballistic missiles and drones, to include new defensive U.S. military deployments.” Hilariously, the statement also claims that “the President stressed the importance of ongoing efforts to de-escalate broader tensions in the region.” Yep, nothing emphasizes the importance of de-escalating broader tensions in the region like pledging unconditional military support for the region’s single most belligerent actor no matter how reckless and insane its aggressions become. This statement from the White House echoes comments from Secretary of “Defense” Lloyd Austin a day earlier, who said “We certainly will help defend Israel” should a wider war break out as a result of Israel’s assassination strikes. All this babbling about “defending” the state of Israel is intended to convey the false impression that Israel has just been sitting there minding its own business, and is about to suffer unprovoked attacks from hostile aggressors for some unfathomable reason. As though detonating military explosives in the capital cities of two nations to conduct political assassinations would not be seen as an extreme act of war in need of a violent response by literally all governments on this planet. In reality, the US isn’t vowing to defend the state of Israel, the US is vowing to help Israel attack other countries. If you’re pledging unconditional support to an extremely belligerent aggressor while it commits the most demented acts of aggression imaginable, all you’re doing is condoning those acts of aggression and making sure it will suffer no consequences when it conducts more of them. A kevlar vest stops being a tool of defense when you wear one to prevent yourself from being stopped by police while conducting a mass shooting. Washington’s position is made even more absurd after all the hysterical shrieking and garment-rending from the Washington establishment following the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. Israel murdered the leader of the Hamas political bureau, not a military commander, and he was the primary negotiator in the mediated ceasefire talks with Israel. This was a political assassination just like a successful attempt on Trump’s life would have been, but probably a lot more consequential. And yet the only response from Washington has been to announce that it will help Israel continue its incendiary brinkmanship throughout the middle east. Washington swamp monsters talk all the time about their desire to promote “peace and stability in the middle east”, while simultaneously pledging loyalty and support for a middle eastern nation whose actions pose a greater obstacle to peace and stability in the region than any other. These contradictions are becoming more and more glaring and apparent before the entire world.

@caitoz - Caitlin Johnstone

So they're really doing it. The Biden administration is really ignoring Australia's request to end the case against Julian Assange, and they're proceeding with their campaign to extradite a journalist for telling the truth about US war crimes. In order to move the extradition case forward, per a British high court ruling US prosecutors needed to provide "assurances" that the US would not seek the death penalty and would not deprive Assange of his human right to free speech because of his nationality. The US provided the assurance against the death penalty (which they'd previously opposed doing), and for the free speech assurance they said only that Assange will be able to "raise and seek to rely upon" US First Amendment rights, adding, “A decision as to the applicability of the First Amendment is exclusively within the purview of the U.S. Courts.” Which is basically just saying "I mean, you're welcome to TRY to have free speech protections?" They're just squeezing and squeezing this man as hard as they can for as long as they can get away with to keep him silent and make an example of him to show what happens when journalists reveal unauthorized information about the empire. Just like Gaza, the persecution of Julian Assange makes a lie of everything the US and its western allies claim to stand for, and reveals the cruel face of tyranny beneath the mask of liberal democracy.

@caitoz - Caitlin Johnstone

Further reading:

@kgosztola - Kevin Gosztola

US government submits "assurances" to the British High Court for Julian Assange's extradition and effectively rejects Australia's call to end the case against the WikiLeaks founder https://thedissenter.org/us-government-rejects-australias-call-to-end-assange-case/

US Rejects Australia's Call To End Assange Case Rather than drop the charges or seek a plea deal, the U.S. government will keep fighting to put the WikiLeaks founder on trial. thedissenter.org

@caitoz - Caitlin Johnstone

Happening at the same time:

@caitoz - Caitlin Johnstone

Assange Extradition Case Moves Forward While The CIA Covers Its Tracks Article with supporting links: https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/assange-extradition-case-moves-forward

Assange Extradition Case Moves Forward While The CIA Covers Its Tracks Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley): So they’re really doing it. The Biden administration is really ignoring Australia’s request to end the case against Julian Assange, and they’re proceeding with their campaign to extradite a journalist for telling the truth about US war crimes. caitlinjohnst.one

@caitoz - Caitlin Johnstone

The main reason I’ve focused so hard on Gaza these last six months isn’t so much because of how evil and horrific Israel’s mass atrocity is in and of itself, but because it’s so intimately intertwined with all our world’s other problems, and with the future of the human species. In a very real way, the destruction of Gaza appears to be a moment in history where humanity is collectively mulling over whether it wants to keep behaving in a crazy, self-destructive way and continue along its trajectory into dystopia and toward self-inflicted extinction, or abandon this madness and push for something better. Whether it wants to keep buying into the lies and propaganda and tacitly consenting to the psychopathic murderousness of the powerful, or let the light of truth shine in. A live-streamed genocide happening right out in the open forces a civilization to start asking questions about itself. If something like this can happen in plain view of everyone, and the people in charge not only do nothing but actively facilitate it, then you have to start wondering if everything about your entire nation is deranged, and if everything you’ve been told about the world is a lie. If something so nakedly evil — undisguised by anything besides a thin veneer of Zionist gaslighting telling us we’re not seeing what we’re seeing — can be allowed to stand by those we’ve entrusted to run things, then it means our entire society is diseased. Our government. Our political systems. Our media. Our education systems. Our worldviews. Our culture. It’s all rotted and corrupted, right down to the core. The future we are being shown through the window of Gaza is dark. Dark, dark, dark, dark. They’re currently using artificial intelligence to create kill lists and to determine when its targets will be at home with their families to ensure maximum civilian deaths. We used to worry about a dark future where humans send machines to go kill people indiscriminately, but it turns out it’s actually happening the other way around — we’re programming machines to tell us who to kill. The horror in our present dystopia isn’t so much autonomous murderbots as ethical decisions about killing being outsourced to AI. We’re being asked to accept this and move forward in this direction into the future. We’re being asked to walk into the future holding the assumption that it’s fine and normal for our governments to knowingly support an unforgivable act of mass slaughter upon the inhabitants of a giant concentration camp. We’re being asked to walk into the future holding the assumption that it’s fine and normal for the mass media to lie and distort and misinform the public about a matter of such urgent importance day after day, month after month. We’re being asked to walk into the future holding the assumption that it’s fine and normal for a blatant genocide to take place right in front of our faces, and then move on as though nothing happened. And right now we’re collectively ruminating on the question of whether we’re going to decide to do those things, or if we’re going to decide to do something else instead. The Gaza genocide is such a massive thing in and of itself — the injustice, the murder, the loss, the unfathomable suffering. But what’s happening in Gaza is also about so much more than Gaza. It’s a moment in history where humanity is thinking seriously about real revolutionary change, and weighing the options between that and continuing along this tired old blood-soaked path we’ve been travelling on for millennia. Gaza proves that our entire civilization is cancerous, and that everything we’ve been doing has failed. When you come across information which blows apart your worldview in your personal life, you can either collapse under the weight of cognitive dissonance until you find some way to plug yourself back into the comforting lies, or you can set about the hard work of forming a new way of looking at things. That’s the sort of moment we’re being collectively offered with Gaza. We’ll either accept the invitation, or continue our slide into darkness.

@caitoz - Caitlin Johnstone

Gaza Asks Us A Question About What Kind Of Future We Want To Have https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/gaza-asks-us-a-question-about-what

Gaza Asks Us A Question About What Kind Of Future We Want To Have Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley): The main reason I’ve focused so hard on Gaza these last six months isn’t so much because of how evil and horrific Israel’s mass atrocity is in and of itself, but because it’s so intimately intertwined with all our world’s other problems, and with the future of the human species. caitlinjohnst.one

@caitoz - Caitlin Johnstone

https://t.co/l4MzYvFdpv

@caitoz - Caitlin Johnstone

"We had to kill the Palestinians because we thought they might explode" is an excuse the IDF can make about literally any Palestinian they kill in literally any possible circumstance.

@leftiblog - Left I on the News

Israel always has some excuse & the media is always happy to print it. But here’s the thing in this case — there hasn’t been a single case of a suicide bombing in Gaza during this war. So Israel’s claim for why they bulldozed two bodies is pure bulls**t. https://www.cnn.com/middleeast/live-news/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news-03-29-24/h_ee1132d10e9161991d227bb90a32d120

Israel admits killing 2 Palestinians and then burying them with a bulldozer after shocking video surfaces The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has admitted killing two Palestinian men and burying their bodies with a bulldozer after Al Jazeera published a video purportedly showing the incident Wednesday.  cnn.com

@caitoz - Caitlin Johnstone

Survivors of the latest Al-Shifa Hospital raid tell Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor that they witnessed groups of prisoners being escorted by IDF troops into the hospital morgue, hearing gunfire, and then seeing the IDF troops return without the prisoners.

@EuroMedHR - Euro-Med Monitor

International community must act immediately to stop Israeli army’s massacre of Palestinians at Al-Shifa Hospital https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6232

International community must act immediately to stop Israeli army’s massacre of Palestinians at Al-Shifa Hospital Israeli massacre in Gaza City’s Al-Shifa Medical Complex and surrounding areas has left at least 100 Palestinians dead euromedmonitor.org

@caitoz - Caitlin Johnstone

Step 1: Write atrocity propaganda Step 2: Wait for others to cite your atrocity propaganda to substantiate their own atrocity propaganda Step 3: Cite their citations of your atrocity propaganda to write more atrocity propaganda Step 4: Repeat

@zei_squirrel - ☀️👀

on February 21, the New York Times allowed Adam Sella, a recently graduated comp lit food blogger with zero reporting experience, to write a solo piece where he cites a "report" sayin there were "many cases of gang rape". But the report only mentions 3 which were already debunked https://t.co/FOibHqUr6C

@caitoz - Caitlin Johnstone

“I’m not so sure about the Child-Killing Murder Robot,” Joe said after a sip of coffee while reading the morning paper. “What??” his wife Anne exclaimed, visibly shocked. “It’s killed thousands of kids in its latest murder rampage,” Joe said. “I’m starting to think maybe the Child-Killing Murder Robot isn’t such a great thing after all.” “Well of course it’s on a murder rampage!” said Anne. “Some people tried to turn it off!” “Yeah the Child-Killing Murder Robot does that whenever anyone tries to turn it off,” replied Joe. “And you know what? I’m starting to think that maybe they’re trying to turn off the Child-Killing Murder Robot because they’re sick of the way it keeps killing children and murdering people!” “It’s acting in self-defense!” Anne protested. “The Child-Killing Murder Robot has a right to defend itself!” “It’s been killing people constantly ever since that team of mad scientists invented it back in the forties, Anne! After a certain amount of child-killing and murder, eventually you’ve got to figure that maybe the blame is on the Child-Killing Murder Robot.” “Look, Joe, I feel terrible about all the child-killing and murder, and I wish it wasn’t happening. But this is a very complicated situation; it’s been going on for many years, and I just don’t see what you could possibly expect the Child-Killing Murder Robot to do at this point besides continue to kill large numbers of children and commit murder at mass scale.” “Well, maybe they could reprogram the Child-Killing Murder Robot so it doesn’t have to kill children and murder people all the time?” “But then it wouldn’t be a Child-Killing Murder Robot!” “Yeah I know, it would be a different sort of thing with a different sort of system. But at least then all the murdering would stop and we’d have peace.” “The Child-Killing Murder Robot has a right to exist!” “Why, Anne? Why does there absolutely need to be a homicidal android that’s always in the news because it’s constantly murdering human beings? I’ve seen people talking about one possible solution where the robot is programmed to regard everyone else as its equal so it doesn’t view them as needing to be murdered. Why couldn’t we try that?” “There is one Child-Killing Murder Robot in the world, Joe. One. And you’re saying there should be zero. You just want to commit genocide.” “What?? That’s the exact opposite of what I want! How can you say that??” “If you don’t believe the Child-Killing Murder Robot has a right to exist in its natural child-killing murderous state, then you’re an evil, genocidal racist. You’re no better than those kids chanting ‘Nobody should be murdered’ on university campuses!” “Anne those students are demonstrating to defend the rights of a population who’s constantly getting murdered by a mindless automaton with machine guns for arms!” “They’re genocidal fascists, Joe. I’m not saying I support 100 percent of the actions of the Child-Killing Murder Robot, but at least it’s not going around college campuses saying things that make people feel uncomfortable.” “Well call me crazy but I just don’t accept that making people feel uncomfortable is equal to or worse than murdering children by the thousands.” “You are crazy, Joe. You’re a crazy, hateful man. I’m going to go spend the night at my sister’s. God, I can’t believe I married a Nazi.”

@caitoz - Caitlin Johnstone

Anne And Joe Argue About The Child-Killing Murder Robot https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/anne-and-joe-argue-about-the-child

Anne And Joe Argue About The Child-Killing Murder Robot Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley): “I’m not so sure about the Child-Killing Murder Robot,” Joe said after a sip of coffee while reading the morning paper. “What??” his wife Anne exclaimed, visibly shocked. “It’s killed thousands of kids in its latest murder rampage,” Joe said. “I’m starting to think maybe the Child-Killing Murder Robot isn’t such a great thing after all.” caitlinjohnst.one

@caitoz - Caitlin Johnstone

Anne And Joe Argue About The Child-Killing Murder Robot Reading by Tim Foley. https://t.co/jbD4JOv0CP

@caitoz - Caitlin Johnstone

Cringiest genocide of all time.

@intifada - Electronic Intifada

🚨WATCH: Israeli children sing, "We will annihilate everyone" in Gaza, against a background of destruction. Disturbing video was posted, then deleted by Israeli national broadcaster @kann_news. We captured it and added English subtitles FULL STORY: https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/watch-israeli-children-sing-we-will-annihilate-everyone-gaza

Watch: Israeli children sing, “We will annihilate everyone” in Gaza National broadcaster Kan publishes -- then deletes -- video promoting genocide. electronicintifada.net

@caitoz - Caitlin Johnstone

I find nothing less morally or philosophically interesting than pontificating on how the traumatized prisoners of a horrible concentration camp should have conducted themselves once they broke free of its confines. As far as I'm concerned everything that happened on that day was the result of generations of Israeli abuse, the British decisions which made it all possible, and the American backing which has kept it going. Israeli policies created Hamas. I don’t mean this in the usual “Netanyahu boosted Hamas to sabotage peace and undermine its more moderate rivals” sense, I mean it in the "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable" sense. If you stomp out every possible peaceful avenue of resistance, naturally you’re going to see the rise of factions which favor violent resistance. One of my most formative experiences in understanding this conflict happened in 2018 when I watched Israeli soldiers firing on protesters with sniper rifles and live ammo. B’Tselem explicitly denounced this as unlawful. There’s nothing that could possibly make such a thing okay, and it was a very clear illustration of the way Israel has cut Palestinians off from all the normal pathways toward peaceful resolution. I said when all this started that I believe the Hamas attack will ultimately be a net negative for Palestinians, but that I can’t in good conscience “condemn Hamas” because nobody can articulate a positive direction that Palestinians should be taking. The fact that all peaceful avenues of resistance have been cut off is not the fault of the Palestinians, and it’s not the fault of Hamas. It’s the fault of the Israeli government. Hamas is just what you get when you create an intolerably abusive apartheid state which keeps millions of people in a concentration camp whose inhabitants are cut off from basic human needs. Hamas isn’t the disease, it’s a symptom of the disease. The disease is an apartheid settler-colonialist project which cannot exist without endless violence, warfare and abuse.

@caitoz - Caitlin Johnstone

My favorite kooky conspiracy theory is the one where Hamas spent two years coordinating and training for an attack of unprecedented scale and sophistication involving motorboats, drones and motorized paragliders in an enclosed area the size of Philadelphia which also happens to be one of the most spied-on places on earth, and this conspiracy by Hamas was carried out so successfully that even Hamas was surprised at how many Israelis they were able to kill and capture, because their conspiring went completely undetected by Israeli intelligence those entire two years despite being warned by Egyptian intelligence that an attack was coming, and despite the fact that US intelligence was aware of unusual activity by Hamas on October 6.

@caitoz - Caitlin Johnstone

One of the most destructive ideas in modern times is this notion that it’s fine and appropriate for governments to act like monsters whenever anything bad happens to their country. We saw it happen with the United States after 9/11, and we’re seeing it now with Israel. Dropping military explosives on children is just as wrong now as it was on October 6th. Wars of aggression were just as wrong on September 12th 2001 as they were on September 10th. But there’s this idiotic belief in mainstream culture that a nation experiencing a traumatic event means it gets to go on a murderous rampage until it feels better. As soon as the Hamas attack occurred we were inundated with messaging from the western political/media class which conveyed the idea that because something bad happened to Israel, Israel now gets to do a little genocide, as a treat. This is stupid nonsense, and should be rejected by all thinking people. No other aspect of human life works like this. A normal guy isn’t permitted to go on a shooting spree at his wife’s workplace just because she cheated on him with Kyle from marketing. He’s not even allowed to be mean to customers at work or he’ll get fired. The rules don’t stop applying to normal people just because something bad happened to them; only when we’re thinking about the giant power conglomerates known as governments is this sloppy thinking ever taken seriously. In fact, in other aspects of life we understand that after a traumatic event it’s actually important to protect our friends and loved ones from making bad decisions in the emotional heat of the moment. You wouldn’t let your sister get an ugly face tattoo after a nasty breakup. If you saw your friend stumbling around with his car keys in one hand and a bottle in the other after losing his job, you wouldn’t tell him you stand with him and support whatever it is he’s getting ready to do. You’d understand that people can make unwise decisions after something bad happens to them, and you’d do what you can to help steer them away from it. But when we extend our thinking out to the world’s deadliest military forces — precisely the things toward which we should be most careful about bad decision-making — all that goes out the window. All of a sudden “You’re either with us or against us” is framed as a perfectly sound and reasonable position to have on issues like multiple full-scale ground invasions, and if you don’t “Stand with Israel” while it bombs Gaza, Lebanon and Syria that means you’re an evil terrorist supporter who probably hates Jews. The death toll from Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza has already more than doubled the death toll from the Hamas attack, and we can expect it to keep multiplying because there’s no meaningful opposition to the bloodshed. The United States, who as an indispensable backer of Israel could end all this with a word, has refused to draw a single red line on what Israel may or may not do if it wishes to retain US support — even its indiscriminate use of white phosphorus, which violates international humanitarian law. War crimes are being committed not just openly but announced in advance as Tel Aviv commits itself to the collective punishment of Palestinians with a complete siege of Gaza, and Israel’s allies have no objection to this. And it’s pretty bad in the general western public as well. Because of the frenetic propaganda campaign by the western press in the wake of the Hamas attack, a new CNN poll finds that half of Americans have been successfully convinced that because something bad happened to Israel, Israel is “fully justified” in raining hellfire on a giant concentration camp in which half the population are children. The moments after a scary and traumatizing event are the very moments we should be most vigilant against abuses by the nation affected by it. Instead we’re doing the exact opposite as a society and silently agreeing that certain nations get a hall pass on war crimes and mass murder whenever something bad happens to them. At the exact time when the light of wisdom needs to be shining at its very brightest, we’re allowing it to be flushed down the toilet. And now as anti-war voices like Trita Parsi, Branko Marcetic and Connor Echols have noted, we’re looking at a conflict that could easily escalate and expand to include other nations in the middle east and the US alliance. All because the world decided that we are now on a temporary holiday away from reason and compassion. This needs to stop. We need to be thinking rationally not just about the current violence but the factors which gave rise to it. That means taking a full accounting of the apartheid abuses which gave rise to Hamas and the Palestinian resistance, ending those abuses and righting the wrongs. It means negotiations. It means diplomacy. It means reparations. It means making concessions. It means sitting down and talking. It means acknowledging the problem so that it can be fixed. And all of this can be avoided for as long as Israel and its allies want to strut about huffing about how they have special license to kill Palestinians now because blah blah victim story. At this point in history, just as after 9/11, war looks so very, very easy and peace looks so very, very difficult. But it’s at these exact moments that we need to be pushing hardest for peace, because this is when it actually matters. This is where the rubber meets the road, folks. This is where the real work of creating a healthy world takes place.

@caitoz - Caitlin Johnstone

People Are Dying For Inches In Ukraine, The “World’s Largest Arms Fair” There’s a heartbreaking graphic going around right now showing the almost microscopic changes that have occurred to the frontline of the war in Ukraine this year despite nonstop death and destruction of unfathomable horror the entire time. The graphic comes from a New York Times article titled “Who’s Gaining Ground in Ukraine? This Year, No One.”, which eventually gets around to acknowledging that Russia has actually gained more ground than Ukraine in 2023 despite Kyiv’s much-hyped counteroffensive which began in June. “When both sides’ gains are added up, Russia now controls nearly 200 square miles more territory in Ukraine compared with the start of the year,” the Times reports. As Left I on the News noted on Twitter, this contradicts the titular claim in another New York Times article published last week under the headline “Ukraine Has Gained Ground. But It Has Much Further To Go.” The reason the map of gains and losses is so heartbreaking is because so much has been given up for so very, very little. At least tens of thousands have died in this war with hundreds of thousands wounded, all for those teeny, tiny little blips on the map. Ukraine is now freckled with more landmines than anywhere else on earth, which experts say will take decades to clear. This giant deathtrap is exacerbated by the cluster munitions that are covering the land with greater and greater frequency, which will go on to detonate and kill civilians (mostly children) for years to come. The mines and artillery fire on the frontline of this war are reportedly creating tens of thousands of amputees, numbers comparable to what was seen in World War I. And all for what? Essentially nothing. A few inches gained here, a few inches lost there. The meaninglessness of it all is probably one of the reasons why military-aged Ukrainian men have been fleeing and attempting to flee the nation in droves to avoid conscription. War is the worst thing in the world. The suffering, trauma and loss of mass military violence is too much to comprehend, even for people who are right there experiencing it. And the only thing worse than a war where one side gets completely steamrolled by the other is one in which people keep killing each other and killing each other over tiny gains and losses on the battlefield without an end to the nightmare anywhere on the horizon. And now we see western officials and media outlets telling us all to prepare for this war to drag on for years, potentially into the 2030s. This nonsensical violence, which even the head of NATO now admits could have been avoided by simply ceasing to amass a western military threat on Russia’s doorstep, is scheduled to drag on as long as possible for no grander reason than the advancement of US strategic interests. This news from The New York Times comes out at the same time as a Wall Street Journal article titled “The War in Ukraine Is Also a Giant Arms Fair,” subtitled “Arms makers are getting orders for weapons being put to the test on the battlefield.” “The Panzerhaubitze howitzer is part of an arsenal of weapons being put to the test in Ukraine in what has become the world’s largest arms fair,” writes WSJ’s Alistair MacDonald. “Companies that make the weapons being used in Ukraine have won orders and resurrected production lines. The deployment of billions of dollars worth of equipment in a major land war has also given manufacturers and militaries a unique opportunity to analyze the battlefield performance of weapons, and learn how best to use them.” This is one of those things that just sounds a bit uncomfortable at first, but if you really sit with the words and deeply contemplate what’s being said here it will show up as so deeply evil it will give you nightmares. The fact that weapons systems are being tested on human bodies to the immense benefit of war profiteers over a completely avoidable and deliberately provoked war is one of the most depraved things you can possibly imagine, and is a clear sign that we are living in a profoundly sick society. This is so, so ugly, and it’s slated to get even uglier — these freaks haven’t even gotten started on China yet. The sooner this monstrous power structure can be brought to its knees, the better it will be for everyone.

@caitoz - Caitlin Johnstone

The fastest way to get me to completely lose interest in your analysis is to start pouring your energy into divisive culture war issues. In a world that’s hurtling toward nuclear annihilation and environmental collapse there’s just no possible justification for running around shitting on trans people and shrieking about pronouns or whatever. Even if you’re generally right about other important issues, the fact that you think that’s a wise expenditure of your political energy tells me you don’t truly understand the gravity of those other issues and have only a very limited perspective to offer.

@caitoz - Caitlin Johnstone

Barack Obama Belongs In A Fucking Cage The Twitter account of America’s 44th president just casually shared some links to organizations providing relief to the victims of the terrible flooding in Libya, which as of this writing has already killed thousands of people. And that would of course be a fine and normal thing for America’s 44th president to do — had America’s 44th president not personally played a massive role in paving the way to the devastation we’re seeing in Libya today. “If you’re looking to help people impacted by the floods in Libya, check out these organizations providing relief,” Obama tweeted. Uhh, excuse me? Sir? You know you’re literally Barack Obama, right? In 2010 the oil-rich Libya ranked higher on the UN Human Development Index than any other nation in Africa, with much better national infrastructure to protect itself from floods and other natural disasters. Today Libya is a chaotic humanitarian disaster where UN-backed investigators now say literal crimes against humanity have been taking place, including women being forced into sexual slavery. What changed? If you’re reading this, you probably already know what changed. In 2011, US, French and British forces helped rebels with extensive links to Al Qaeda kill Libya’s longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi, which immediately plunged the nation into violence, chaos, extremism and instability which persists to this day. It was later revealed that NATO powers knew they were backing murderous Al Qaeda-linked jihadists at the time. Falsely branded a “humanitarian intervention” designed to prevent alleged plans for genocide and Viagra-fueled mass rapes against peaceful protesters by Gaddafi’s troops, the NATO attack on Libya quickly morphed into a regime change operation which saw Gaddafi brutally lynched in the streets and dying after being stabbed in the anus with a bayonet. Years later in 2016 a UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee found that the narratives used to justify the intervention in Libya were “not supported by the available evidence.” “We have seen no evidence that the UK Government carried out a proper analysis of the nature of the rebellion in Libya,” the report reads. “UK strategy was founded on erroneous assumptions and an incomplete understanding of the evidence.” This confirmed concerns voiced by Amnesty International and a UN human rights investigator months before Gaddafi’s death that the evidence for the alleged atrocities the intervention was meant to prevent simply wasn’t there to be found. Because no policy changes were made after the Iraq invasion and nobody was ever punished for inflicting that horror upon our world, no lessons were learned, and it happened again. The west was deceived into yet another disastrous military intervention, which continues to have severe consequences for people in the region to this day. In an article published earlier this month in Responsible Statecraft about the crisis in Niger, Branko Marcetic made the interesting observation that the Nigerien junta which ousted the previous government has explicitly stated that the coup was necessary because of the “continuous deterioration of the security situation” which Niger and other countries in the Sahel have been suffering from for over a decade due to “the negative socioeconomic, security, political and humanitarian consequences of NATO’s hazardous adventure in Libya.” Marcetic also notes that the regime change intervention in Libya was meant to segue into a regime change intervention in Syria by the same means: “Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), and John Kerry (D-Mass.) all called for a no-fly zone. ‘I love the military … but they always seem to find reasons why you can’t do something rather than why you can,’ complained McCain. The American Enterprise Institute’s Danielle Pletka said it would be ‘an important humanitarian step.’ The now-defunct Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) think tank gathered a who’s who of neoconservatives to repeatedly urge the same. In a letter to then-President Barack Obama, they quoted back Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech in which he argued that ‘inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later.’ “Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, reportedly instrumental in persuading Obama to act, was herself swayed by similar arguments. Friend and unofficial adviser Sidney Blumenthal assured her that, once Gaddafi fell, ‘limited but targeted military support from the West combined with an identifiable rebellion’ could become a new model for toppling Middle Eastern dictators. Pointing to the similar, deteriorating situation in Syria, Blumenthal claimed that ‘the most important event that could alter the Syrian equation would be the fall of Gaddafi, providing an example of a successful rebellion.’ ” And that’s exactly what the Obama administration set out to do: pouring weapons into Syria with the goal of effecting regime change, once again on the side of Al Qaeda-linked fighters. Had Russia not intervened in 2015 to prevent Damascus from being toppled, Syria would likely have suffered the same fate as Libya. So that’s two countries Obama and his cohorts tossed in the incinerator back-to-back, in much the same way the previous administration torched Afghanistan and Iraq. It was done a bit more slyly and subtly than the overt Hulk Smash ground invasions of the Bush era, but the death, suffering and destabilization caused by Obama’s depravity have been just as real. This is as clear as day, and yet we still get imperial propaganda outlets like The Washington Post telling us that “everyone” is to blame for Libya’s current troubles. WaPo has a new article out titled “Libya’s catastrophe is everyone’s fault,” which is a bit like Charles Manson saying the Manson Family killings were everyone’s fault. The article’s author Ishaan Tharoor lays the blame for Libya’s inability to adequately protect its people from the flood on “Libya’s feuding factions and fractured polity” as well as other nations in the region before conceding that NATO’s toppling of Gaddafi would have also played some role. Another Washington Post article titled “How a decade of conflict and division put Libya in peril of disaster” lays zero blame at all on Obama and NATO powers for the nation’s suffering, saying only that Gaddafi was a brutal dictator who “was killed by rebel forces during a NATO-backed Arab Spring uprising.” But it does acknowledge that Libyans are now dying because the nation’s infrastructure has been in a state of decay since 2011: “The country, with terrain ranging across desert and coastal communities, is highly vulnerable to human-induced climate change. But improvements to and maintenance of basic services and infrastructure, such as the country’s networks of dams, has been deprioritized, said Mary Fitzgerald, a Libya expert at the Middle East Institute, a Washington think tank. “‘Between 2011 and 2014, there were already concerns about the state of Libyan infrastructure,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘And then Libya went through a six-year civil conflict from 2014 to 2020 and a lot of infrastructure was damaged during that conflict. In the three years since, you have a situation of rival government, which has yet again complicated political dynamics.’” This nation has been in a continuous state of strife, violence and suffering since the United States spearheaded a NATO campaign to smash it to pieces. And yet you’ll still get empire simps telling you that NATO is a “defensive alliance”, and you’ll still get liberals saying that Obama’s worst scandal was wearing a tan suit one time. Barack Obama belongs in a fucking cage. His crimes are utterly unforgivable, and if the law existed to punish the world’s worst criminals instead of to protect them he would be rotting in a maximum security prison cell. It’s all well and good that people are sending Libya aid and that the call to do so is being amplified by influential voices. But the fact that the 44th president of the United States can just come out and pretend to support a nation he personally helped destroy without being called out and excoriated by the mass media shows that we live in a world which is dominated by lies and propaganda.

@caitoz - Caitlin Johnstone

Barack Obama Belongs In A Fucking Cage Article with supporting links. https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/barack-obama-belongs-in-a-fucking

Barack Obama Belongs In A Fucking Cage Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley): The Twitter account of America’s 44th president just casually shared some links to organizations providing relief to the victims of the terrible flooding in Libya, which as of this writing has already caitlinjohnst.one

@caitoz - Caitlin Johnstone

Barack Obama Belongs In A Fucking Cage Reading by Tim Foley. https://t.co/Nsy3RvVrzH

@caitoz - Caitlin Johnstone

I just read a disturbing paragraph in a New Yorker article about the Instant Pot, a popular electronic pressure cooker whose parent company recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy: “So what doomed the Instant Pot? How could something that was so beloved sputter? Is the arc of kitchen goods long but bends toward obsolescence? Business schools may someday make a case study of one of Instant Pot’s vulnerabilities, namely, that it was simply too well made. Once you slapped down your ninety dollars for the Instant Pot Duo 7-in-1, you were set for life: it didn’t break, it didn’t wear out, and the company hasn’t introduced major innovations that make you want to level up. As a customer, you were one-and-done, which might make you a happy customer, but is hell on profit-and-growth performance metrics.” Just think about that for a second. Under our current systems for profit generation, which is the primary driver of human behavior on this planet, making a quality product that lasts a long time instead of quickly going obsolete or turning into landfill will actually drive you into bankruptcy. An article in The Atlantic about the bankruptcy filing similarly illustrated this point last month: “From the point of view of the consumer, this makes the Instant Pot a dream product: It does what it says, and it doesn’t cost you much or any additional money after that first purchase. It doesn’t appear to have any planned obsolescence built into it, which would prompt you to replace it at a regular clip. But from the point of view of owners and investors trying to maximize value, that makes the Instant Pot a problem. A company can’t just tootle along in perpetuity, debuting new products according to the actual pace of its good ideas, and otherwise manufacturing and selling a few versions of a durable, beloved device and its accessories, updated every few years with new features. A company needs to grow.” This just says such dysmal things about why our planet is facing the existential crises it’s now facing. Corporations will die if they don’t continually grow, and they can’t grow without things like inbuilt planned obsolescence or continued additional purchases, which in a sane society would just be regarded as shoddy craftsmanship. Our entire civilization is driven by the pursuit of profit, and to keep turning large profits your corporation needs to continually grow, and your corporation can’t continually grow unless you’re manufacturing a crappy product that needs to be continually replaced or supplemented, and you can’t manufacture those replacements and supplementations without harvesting them from the flesh of a dying world. As writer Robert Moor recently observed on Twitter, “The fact that Instant Pot is already being framed as a corporate cautionary tale — the company that went bankrupt because they made a product so durable and versatile that its customers had little need to buy another one — instead of as a critique of capitalism is deeply, deeply depressing.” It’s really heartbreaking to think about all the ways human potential is being starved and constricted by these ridiculous limitations we’ve placed on the way we operate as a collective. Resources being allocated based on how well they can turn a profit stymies technological innovation, because the most profitable model will always lose out to less profitable ones that are more beneficial to people and our environment. Someone could invent a free energy machine that lasts forever and costs next to nothing, and even though it would save the world you can be certain it would never see the light of day under our current systems, because it couldn’t yield huge and continuous profits and it would destroy many current means of profit generation. Science should be the most collaborative endeavor in the world; every scientist on earth should be collaborating and communicating. Instead, because of our competition-based models, it’s the exact opposite: scientific exploration is divided up into innovators competing against other innovators, corporations competing against other corporations, nations competing against other nations. If we could see how much we are losing to these competition-based models, how much innovation is going unrealized, how much human thriving is being sacrificed, how we’re losing almost all of our brainpower potential to these models, we’d fall to our knees and scream with rage. If science had been a fully collaborative worldwide hive mind endeavor instead of divided and turned against itself for profit and military power, our civilization would be unimaginably more advanced than it is. This is doubtless. We gave up paradise to make a few bastards rich. Our competition-based, profit-motivated systems limit scientific innovation, and they also greatly limit the scope of solutions we can avail ourselves of. There’s a whole vast spectrum of potential solutions to the troubles we face as a species, and we’re limiting ourselves to a very small, very inferior fraction of it. By limiting solutions to ones that are profitable, we’re omitting any which involve using less, consuming less, leaving resources in the ground, and leaving nature the hell alone. We’re also shrinking the incentive to cure sicknesses and eliminate problems rather than offer expensive, ongoing treatments and services for them. Or even a project as fundamental to our survival as getting all the pollution out of our oceans. The profit motive offers no solution to this problem because there’s no way to make a surplus of money from doing so, and in fact it would be very costly. So the pollution stays in our seas, year after year. People have come up with plenty of solutions for removing pollution from the sea, but they never get rolled out at the necessary scale because there’s no way to make it profitable. And people would come up with far more solutions if they knew those solutions could be implemented. How many times have you had an awesome idea and gotten all excited about it, only to do the math and figure out that it’s unfeasible because wouldn’t be profitable? This is a very common experience, and it’s happening to ideas for potential solutions to our problems every day. The profit motive system assumes the ecocidal premise of infinite growth on a finite world. Without that, the entire system collapses. So there are no solutions which involve not growing, manufacturing less, consuming less, not artificially driving up demand with advertising, etc. It’s hard to appreciate the significance of this artificial limitation when you’re inside it and lived your whole life under its rules. It’s like if we were only allowed to make things out of wood; if our whole civilization banned the entire spectrum of non-woodcraft innovation. Sure such a civilization would get very good at making wooden things, and would probably have some woodcrafting innovations that our civilization doesn’t have. But it would also be greatly developmentally stunted. That’s how badly we’re handicapping ourselves with the profit motive model from the pursuit of viable solutions. And some solutions would be really great right now. This planet just had its warmest week in recorded history, and Antarctic sea ice is now failing to form in what for the southern hemisphere is the dead of winter. Even if you still want to pretend global warming isn’t real, this planet’s biosphere is giving us plenty of other signs of looming collapse, including plummeting insect populations, a loss of two-thirds of Earth’s wildlife over the last 50 years, ecosystems dying off, forests disappearing, soil becoming rapidly less fertile, mass extinctions, and oceans gasping for oxygen and becoming lifeless deserts while continents of plastic form in their waters. So our need for immediate solutions to our environmental crisis is not seriously debatable. But we’re not getting solutions, we’re getting a world ruled by corporations whose leaders are required to place growth above all other other concerns, even concerns about whether the future will contain an ecosystem which corporations can exist in or a human species for them to sell goods and services to. Corporations function as giant, world-eating sociopaths, because our current models let their leaders and lawyers wash their hands of all the consequences of the damage their monsters inflict in the name of growth and the duty to maximize shareholder profits. People worry about the world getting destroyed by machines driven by a heartless artificial intelligence, but we might end up destroying it with a kind of artificial mind we invented long before microchips: the corporation. So much of humanity’s dysfunction can be explained by the fact that corporations (A) pretty much run the world and (B) are required to act like sociopaths by placing profit above all other concerns. As long as human behavior remains driven by profit, ecocide will continue, because ecocide is profitable. As long as human behavior remains driven by profit, wars will continue, because war is profitable. As long as human behavior remains driven by profit, exploitation will continue, because exploitation is profitable. As long as human behavior remains driven by profit, corruption will continue, because corruption is profitable. There is no “good” model in which human behavior can remain driven by profit without these destructive behaviors continuing, because so many kinds of destructive behavior will always necessarily be profitable. No proponents of any iteration of capitalism have ever been able to provide any satisfactory answers to this. The call then is to move from competition-based, profit-driven systems to systems which are based on collaboration toward the common good of all. We’re a long way off from that, but a long way can be cleared in a short time under the right conditions. Our species is at adapt-or-die time, and the adaptation that must be made is clear.